Reviews Around The Web

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Solid-state drives have been around for a few years, but they have only begun to gain some real momentum over the past year or so. Perhaps at a much slower pace than predicted, prices have come down significantly from first-generation products, while capacity and performance has improved dramatically as well. There's still a lot to be made before SSDs can go mainstream, though not all the burden can be placed on them, as supporting interfaces also required an upgrade.
This year marked the beginning of a transition from SATA 3Gb/s to SATA 6Gb/s, with AMD already implementing this technology into their latest chipsets, and from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0. Both have the potential to help drive demand for SSD technology, but we feel the latter in particular is much more overdue, coming at a time when the aging USB 2.0 standard has become tremendously inefficient and is failing to meet today's demands for portable storage.